(Alternate Title: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Facebook and Twitter)

Last week's Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston is in the books, and while I'd like to give the usual kudos to Steve Wylie and team for a well organized, and well executed event, I thought it also appropriate the share some thoughts as I look back.

1. Enterprise 2.0 is real, and perhaps more importantly, the business benefits are real (and so are the challenges). Attendees heard success stories from end-user organizations including Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton. Perhaps more importantly, speakers and attendees both heard plenty from other attendees on challenges related to governance, security, user acceptance, and building a business case in tough economic times. A panel I moderated on security and identity in an Enterprise 2.0 world generated enough discussion to last a second hour if we had the time.

2. We're all Facebook and Twitter now. There are over a dozen press releases now on the E 2.0 site , almost all with a common theme of taking the capabilities of Facebook and Twitter and bringing them into the enterprise in a manner that meets requirements for security, compliance, and governance, but that also enables support for both internal and external collaboration.

3. Moving from hype to reality. Tying into theme #1 above, I saw a great deal of focus by companies such as Telligent and several others on actually "measuring" Enterprise 2.0 success via analytics and metrics. This is extremely important to enable moving from Enterprise 2.0 evangelizing to being able to share tangible business benefits.

4. Lines are blurring between social computing and unified communications. During our wednesday morning keynote on social networking there was much agreement that organizations need to think about collaboration holistically and look for ways to integrate planning around both synchronous and asynchronous communications and collaboration applications. Seeing the founder of Socialcast sitting among representatives of Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and IBM Lotus Sametime sends a clear message that worlds are colliding, but perhaps the announcement of a fall Enterprise 2.0 co-located with VoiceCon in San Francisco in November sends an even more startling message. I've heard some suggestions that social messaging services such as Twitter could render investments in unified communications moot as people rapidly change the way they communicate - moving from voice/video/instant messaging to SMS/micro-blogging, profile tagging/wall-posting. I think this will be a fascinating discussion to continue in November.

With these thoughts in mind I look forward to continuing the discussions here on the Enterprise 2.0 blog as well as on Twitter @imlazar, #e2conf.

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